


Till it shall please the Lord by death

by disenchanted



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Established Relationship, Gender Issues, M/M, Marriage, Period-Typical Racism, Rank Difference, Scurvy, Wedding Rings, a love triangle between an Anglican a Catholic and a Presbyterian, taking 'till death do us part' very literally
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-12-07 09:32:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18233075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: Gibson and Irving marry.





	Till it shall please the Lord by death

i. _autumn and winter_

If Gibson had really married Hickey—if he had been a woman, and become Hickey’s wife—his life ashore would have been pitiful. Where would a wife of Hickey’s live, what would she have to do? They would be poor, their home squalid. Probably Hickey would send her whoring.

If he had married Irving, what then? Putting aside that a third lieutenant was unlikely to marry, and not at all likely to marry a woman so far below him as Gibson was. Irving wasn’t wealthy, but he had more money for himself than Gibson ever would: they would have a respectable house in Edinburgh, and while Irving was away Gibson would keep company with other officers’ wives. He was decent with a needle and thread; instead of mending the officers’ clothing he would stitch samplers.

But Gibson was a sailor, a sea-wife only, and on _Terror_ Hickey had loved him well: he had given him a generous share of the things he had stolen, he had lain with him on a bed of extra slops and kissed his neck and hands.

Now Gibson lay with Irving, crammed into his narrow bed, the railing pressing into his back and Irving’s prick stiff against his thigh. They had been, despite their unforgivable intimacy, chaste. They kissed, they each felt that the other was hard, they examined each other’s bodies with their eyes and their fingers and waited until they were alone to bring themselves off. Irving pretended he didn’t, but Gibson smelt it in his linen, which went unwashed because it was the dead of winter and there was scarcely space enough below-decks to hang the officers’ clothing to dry. When he washed Irving’s clothing he saw the stains on his shirttails, too, and the long cotton drawers he wore under his trousers for warmth. Still Irving would not let him touch his prick.

‘Let me,’ said Gibson, touching Irving’s stomach through his shirt. ‘You’ve brought me into your bed: you could be lashed for as little as this. Why not have me?’

‘Because it would be fornication,’ said Irving, ‘whether or not I’m lashed for it.’

‘As an inveterate sinner I couldn’t be expected to understand,’ Gibson teased.

‘I haven’t any less faith in you than I have in anybody else. Only God can choose who to extend His mercy to.’

‘Are you waiting for me to reform myself, then?’ asked Gibson. ‘If I did I wouldn’t even kiss you.’

Irving touched, with a gentle fingertip, Gibson’s eyelashes. Gibson shut his eyes; Irving swept his hair back and kissed his forehead. Irving’s breath smelt like the tinned meat and vegetables the officers had had for supper that evening. When he kissed Gibson’s mouth again, Gibson tasted the lead from the tins.

Gibson said, ‘Why not marry me? Then you could do what you liked.’

‘Well I can’t,’ said Irving, ‘obviously.’

‘Though we’ve two immortal souls, the same as any man and woman?’ Gibson followed the lifted line of Irving’s eyebrow with his fingertips. He liked so much to touch him. ‘That’s what Cornelius always told me: that a soul was who you were without society.’

‘I expect he’s told you a great deal of nonsense.’

‘There’s always some sense in what he says.’

‘That’s the devil’s game—making you think there’s sense in it.’

Irving took Gibson’s hand and kissed the back of it, then the front of it, as if he were driving a nail through. Gibson put his fingers in Irving’s mouth.

 

* * *

 

Irving painted with watercolours, like an anatomist or a gentlewoman. Last winter he had done studies of _Terror_ and her crew; this winter he worked from memory, or from fantasy. He did pictures of women like in the Ladies’ Cabinet, their faces vague and their figures idealised but the complex printed patterns on their dresses mathematically drawn. The men laughed about it behind his back, but Gibson would never tell him so. He sat at Irving’s side and watched him patiently.

‘Is that a lady you knew, sir?’ he asked.

Irving was putting in the faint curving strokes of her face, a line for a little delicate nose and a line for a bland benevolent smile. When that dried, he blotted a fashionable red into her cheeks. Resting his chin in his hand, Gibson thought of how nice it would be to be a lady—not any woman, but one of good breeding, with a personal income and a pretty face. He supposed if he were one he’d dream of joining the navy as a ship’s boy and sailing to the west coast of Africa.

‘No,’ said Irving. ‘I haven’t been much in the company of ladies. I’ve been at sea.’

Their companionship, his and Irving’s, had not gone unnoticed. Nothing on _Terror_ did: not Captain Crozier’s drunkenness, not the abrupt end to what had been a sound and earnest friendship between Mr Gibson and Mr Hickey. Whether any of the men guessed what he and Irving did in secret, Gibson didn’t know.

All of them, men and officers, had developed strange intimacies over the course of these two dark winters. They had grown into and around one another; they smothered one another like overgrown ivy. The oil lamps blurred their vision, so that none of them could say exactly what they saw.

 

* * *

 

When they met that night, Gibson lay in Irving’s bed and kissed his neck. With his nose and cheek scratched by Irving’s beard, he said, ‘Have you been in the company of women who weren’t ladies?’

‘I haven’t been in the habit of it.’

‘But you have had women?’

‘Yes,’ said Irving. ‘It was very little pleasure, and I regret it. I was hurting women I might have otherwise uplifted. And it was a long time ago.’

Gibson said, ‘They wouldn’t have listened if you had tried to preach to them. I’m sure they’d already suffered enough from people who hoped to save their souls.’

‘I couldn’t have done anything about their souls,’ said Irving, incredulous. He believed in predestination; he had tried to explain to Gibson that this didn’t necessitate fatalism, but Gibson had never been convinced.

‘Was there ever a woman you loved?’

Irving pulled his palm up and down Gibson’s back, smoothing the shirt-fabric under his hand, then letting it billow back up again. He said, ‘No. I would have liked it if there had been. A woman I could love, at least. It’s a great treasure, you see: love at its purest. It exalts its—’

‘Victims,’ Gibson finished.

Their faces were close, they were nose-to-nose. Gibson could see little of Irving but his eyes, his wide pupils and the slivers of white between his irises and his eyelids. He had the feeling of being regarded. It was less strange for an officer to bugger his servant than to look at him like that.

 

* * *

 

_Terror_ , already precarious, began to list so badly that when Irving and Gibson were in bed together gravity pushed them up against the bulkhead. If they tried to shift closer to the railing they would slip back down again. Gibson, who never had reason to cross between _Terror_ and _Erebus_ , had not been on steady ground since the summer; he wondered whether his blood had started flowing wrongly.

He was dizzy. His stomach rolled, though he had never been seasick before. The parts of him that were exposed to the air—his face, his neck, his forearms—were cold, while his armpits and the crease of his arse and the backs of his knees were moist with sweat. There was something in it that reminded him of the nights he’d spent in the sick berth of Wanderer, shaking and vomiting from malaria.

Irving took his hand and said, ‘I haven’t got a ring.’

‘Sorry?’ said Gibson.

‘There are dissenters who believe that a marriage can be entered into by two people alone,’ said Irving. ‘They say that God is the one who marries them, and the rest are only witnesses.’

‘That’s not what you believe.’

‘William, please. You don’t believe anything. Let me—’ There was nothing after that; he couldn’t say what he wanted Gibson to let him do, either because he couldn’t think it or because it was too filthy to say aloud.

It humiliated Gibson to realise how deeply he was affected. All his blood had gone to his face; he was overwarm, his throat was tight. The bulkhead pressed hard against his back, but his limbs were wrapped up in Irving’s limbs. He felt, as strongly as he had ever done, that Irving was his superior and that the affection he expressed was nothing but a bizarre manifestation of the lust he denied himself.

Once _Terror_ was in port again Irving would be horrified. Gibson didn’t know whether he should allow it now and suffer later the pain of being cast off, or whether he should disappoint Irving as quickly as possible and keep his dignity. But their journey would go on for a long time yet. If he spurned Irving’s affection he might come to learn what it was like to serve an officer who took every chance he had to make him suffer. And besides, he did— No, he couldn’t think it, even to himself.

‘He that loveth not knoweth not God,’ said Irving. ‘If we love one another—’

Funny that Irving kissed him under the eyes of God, but wouldn’t dare to look at him under the eyes of his captain. Would Irving disobey orders if he felt it was what God had willed him to do? Gibson supposed that was what he was doing now, offering himself as a husband.

Gibson touched Irving’s full, red cheek. ‘Would you really marry me?’ he asked. ‘If you could.’

Irving said, ‘Of course I would. I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t mean it.’

‘You didn’t ask me.’

‘I thought I did.’

‘I wish I could sleep here,’ said Gibson. ‘There are some who would say it isn’t a proper wedding night if the couple sleeps apart. Of course I don’t know if they’re dissenters who say that.’

‘I’ll give you a wedding night when we’re in England again. It’ll be very jolly; we’ll drink wine and be very drunk. We’ll go to the country. My great-uncle has a cottage in Canonbie, north of Carlisle, just past the border. If it’s summer we can sleep out of doors.’

Alone in his own bed, listening to the snores and groans of the men in the hammocks, Gibson gave himself leave to pretend, just for the time it took to bring himself off, that what Irving said was true. A cottage in the Scottish lowlands, a summer night warm enough that they could sleep naked on the grass, their shirts rolled up under their heads like pillows. Irving would tell him how to navigate by the stars, though he knew already. There would be no shame: Irving would fuck him and they would be one flesh.

Just before he finished Gibson thought of how Cornelius had liked to call him ‘my wife’ and ‘my darling’, and sometimes ‘my dearest girl’ and ‘my sweet girl’. He had felt soft and weak, and had liked it; he would tremble if Cornelius spoke against his ear. If it hadn’t been as good as it was he wouldn’t have risked himself for it. And because he did risk himself, and was caught, he had Irving, who might have honestly believed that he would keep Gibson even after the expedition ended. For all his kindness Cornelius had never told Gibson he would keep him.

 

* * *

 

The next time Gibson came to his bed-cabin, John was wearing a knotted loop of string around his left little finger. Carefully he pulled it off and put it on Gibson’s ring finger; it was as proper a fit as John could have made it. He took Gibson’s chin in his hand and kissed him as long and as hard as he’d ever done.

Gibson put the ring in a carved ivory box he’d bought when Wanderer was in port at Cape Town. He felt it on him even when he wasn’t wearing it, and sometimes scratched his finger as if there were an itch. He imagined writing his sister to tell her he had been wed at sea, but was saved the trouble of actually doing it, as his sister was dead five years.

 

* * *

 

He and John fucked for the first time some time after that. One night they began to kiss and stopped only when they had finished each other off. Though Gibson didn’t dare to ask whether this was fornication, John seemed not to act like it was. He kissed Gibson with tongue and told him he loved him, and other things besides.

Cornelius put a real ring on his finger—a cheap one, but metal at least. Gibson took it off and gave it back. He said, ‘I’ll tell you what you like. You don’t have to bribe me.’

‘Would it make you feel unfaithful to Lieutenant Irving?’ Cornelius was smiling up at him, inscrutable. ‘It’s just a bauble, isn’t it? You couldn’t fit it on your ring finger.’

‘No,’ said Gibson, ‘it’s only that I don’t need it. I’ve been taking stock of what I need and what I don’t.’

In the weeks before the first sunlight of the year, Gibson taught John how to bugger him. The marriage, such as it was, had been the point at which the ironwork of the navy’s hierarchy had been bent permanently around them. The sodomy was a natural consequence and an irrelevant one. John was eager but gentle: he latched his lips to the back of Gibson’s neck as he fucked him, and bit bruises into the skin that, because Gibson was ill, remained.

 

* * *

 

On the last night before they abandoned the ships, they slept knowing that the bodies of the men who had been killed at Carnivale were lying out on the ice in the spring wind. There wasn’t room on either ship for so many dead men; there were already corpses piled high in the deadroom on _Terror_.

John returned to his bed-cabin at eight bells in the middle watch, two hours before he was due to rise again. Gibson had been waiting for him, and had fallen asleep. John kissed him awake, and for a moment Gibson was angry: he had been having a dream about England. But this was the last night they would have on _Terror_ , which had been the sole witness to so much of what had passed between them. Gibson wanted to give her as much as he could to remember.

‘As soon as a man has fresh meat in him the scurvy leaves him,’ John was saying. He was kissing Gibson’s neck, pulling up his shirt to expose the bruises on his ribs. ‘I’ve seen it myself—I’ve been at sea longer than you have. It’ll be a matter of days.’

‘I know,’ said Gibson, ‘you’ve told me already.’

John said, ‘I’ve sworn to the Queen to protect these men, but I’ve sworn to God to protect you.’

He let Gibson sleep for an hour next to him; he stayed awake to listen to the bells. Though Gibson slept fairly deeply, he felt John’s hands in his hair. He was of sound enough mind to be thankful that John was so close.

Coming out of John’s bed-cabin, Gibson saw that Jopson was in the passageway, having just left the captain’s cabin. Jopson saw him; they regarded each other and were on their way, silent in the way they had been taught to be.

 

* * *

 

ii. _spring and summer_

Gibson, knowing that he was ill, had spent the past month wondering whether he should apologise to John for having the bad manners to die first. He laughed, then—dryly, unnoticed among a crowd of men clamouring to know what the savages had done—when he learned that John was dead. He was perhaps the only one who knew it was one of their own that had done it.

Cornelius put on a show for the rest of them; he wrapped himself in a blanket and made his voice break in the middle of sentences, like other men’s voices sometimes did genuinely. Gibson went into the tent he shared with Hoar, who was attending to Hodgson, and lay down in his cot. He thought of flinging his face into his blanket and suffocating himself, and found he was too weak even to try. Alone, staring at the shadows on the tent wall, he cursed until his throat ached sufficiently to silence him. John deserved a better sort of grief.

What had their last night together been like? Gibson’s ears rang; his mouth tasted perpetually of blood. He was forgetting consequential things—his second name (George), his age (twenty-five), his mother’s address (12 Catherine’s Court, Salford). John had written down his father’s address in Edinburgh, but Gibson couldn’t recall where he had put the paper. He had taken it with him when they had left the ships, he remembered that at least.

Their last night was the last Terror camp spent on the ice. The next day they would cross over onto land and begin looking for game. Gibson was so ill that he and John were as chaste as they had been before they were married. John held his hand and kissed him softly, and Gibson, who had suffered a great deal in pursuit of his desires, pitied himself. He asked John to fuck him, but John said he wouldn’t, he’d hurt him. He combed Gibson’s overlong hair instead, and trimmed his mustache just enough to get it out of his mouth. The ships were abandoned, the expedition a failure: why should John remain the officer, Gibson the servant?

Gibson had left the ivory box behind. He wore the ring John had given him under his gloves; he was wearing it now. He had heard Cornelius telling the men that Lieutenant Irving’s fingers had been cut off by the braves; he imagined Cornelius doing it himself, with the carving knife he had stolen from among the officer’s utensils. Probably John had used the same knife to cut a tough piece of tinned beef or pork.

John’s fingers had always been rough and scabbed; Gibson had chastised him for pulling at the scabs, making the wounds worse. He had taken John’s fingers to his mouth and tasted his blood. Now he and Cornelius both knew the taste.

Gibson moved his own fingers, which were stiff but mobile still. He gloried in the fact that he was alive and could move when John could not. There was no time for sentiment: he had to live the rest of his life in the span of a few days or weeks, however long it would take for him to stop being able to haul.

 

* * *

 

The camps split. They advanced south independently; the mutineers stayed within five or six miles’ distance from the Terrors, close enough to send a scout to walk the distance in a day. They ate from the tins despite knowing that something in them was making them ill.

A day after Terrors had abandoned the camp where John was buried, Cornelius had returned with Tozer and Pilkington to loot what they could. From then on Cornelius wore John’s coat, which was ripped where he had stabbed him. When the light hit the flapping fabric and illuminated the holes in it Gibson thought of what John’s face must have looked like. Gibson thought he must have died without quite knowing what was happening.

Christ, Christ, Christ, thought Gibson, fuck, I don’t want to die yet. But his pain was worse, his joints stiffer, his teeth looser every day. It was funny to him that he had spent so long worrying whether he was handsome, and how far above his station he would be able to rise. To love and be loved, truly, for however long one’s pitiful little life lasted, was all one was meant to do. Not loving God, but that ugly creature Man—and perhaps, in that, loving God…

Cornelius wasn’t a man. Gibson wasn’t either, but in a very different way. Cornelius looked at the bare unrelenting sun of the Arctic summer as if he were reading something in it. The brightness hurt Gibson’s head. Since Cornelius had ended the practice of announcing watches, he could not tell time except by the position of the sun.

It was early enough in the year that the sun still went behind the horizon, though only for a few hours each night. Gibson and Cornelius spent their nights together, lying on the same cot, under the same blanket, in Cornelius’ captain’s tent. There was no one who could tell them that they couldn’t: the mutineers belonged to Cornelius now. Gibson lay with Cornelius’ forehead pressed against his chest and half-dreamt of swimming in clear, temperate water.

 

* * *

 

In the middle of one of those half-dark nights Gibson came round to Cornelius peeling his left glove off his hand, exposing the ring that Gibson still wore beneath. The string was frayed now, near to falling apart; Gibson had thought he would keep it on as long as it would stay, and when it fell off he would stop wishing for John to come back.

‘Is that his?’ asked Cornelius, chafing warmth into Gibson’s stiff hands. ‘Is that why you wouldn’t take the ring I gave you?’

‘He gave it to me,’ said Gibson.

‘Don’t you remember that we were married first? We were married the first time I called you my wife. It was as simple as that. We promised ourselves to each other.’

‘Yes, and I ended it.’

‘You can’t end a marriage, Billy. It doesn’t end until death. Whether or not you took the ring doesn’t matter; it was a sacrament all the same.’

‘You have me again now,’ said Gibson.

Cornelius took Gibson’s left hand and kissed his knuckles, and Gibson loved him as much as he had ever done. He wanted to wash his shirts again, like he’d done the first winter they were trapped in the ice: when they met in the forepeak Cornelius would give Gibson one of his two shirts, and Gibson would wash it with the officers’ clothing and mend any tears and return it to him clean, folded, a tidy expression of complete devotion.

‘I always had you,’ said Cornelius. His feet pressed against Gibson’s calves; his eyes were at a level with Gibson’s, and he was stroking Gibson’s hair even as strands of it came away in his hands. ‘For a while you were afraid. You only needed to stop being afraid—and then you did.’

Giving himself over to Cornelius made Gibson feel as if he were reciting the Apostles’ Creed: yes yes yes, he was saying, I believe, I believe, I believe. The forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. It was only Cornelius who could give these things to him now: he was the only one left to whom Gibson could be loyal. God was not anywhere; Cornelius was in his arms. They were landlocked, but the air smelt like the ocean.

 

* * *

 

When he hauled, Gibson could not remember anything about who he was or had been. He was a creature in harness, a sick thing frothing and stumbling; he looked at the sun on the rocks in front of him and saw nothing else, no faded imprint of a face or a quiver of candlelight in black winter. He felt the sunlight shining through him as if he were glass.

I was born, he told himself, in the year of our lord eighteen twenty-three. Like any other person on this earth, I was born. I was born in Salford, on Upper St Georges Street. I went to sea… The more he repeated it the more it began not to matter. He was a soul hung on a piece of flesh, belonging to no sex or nation. There were figures to either side of him, and rocks underneath his moving feet. There was blood in his mouth that occasionally he spat out.

Damn the rest, thought Gibson: let Cornelius live. Let him get what he wants. Did he deserve it? Well, who out of any of them got what they deserved? Good men had died worse deaths than the death Gibson would have; John had died a worse death.

Numbness, a sense of a sort of absence, began in Gibson’s toes and moved upwards into his ankles, then his knees. Before he stumbled so badly that he fell, he asked Pilkington, who had been walking, to switch with him. For the rest of the day he would walk alongside the sledges. When they stopped and made camp he would pass the night with Cornelius, and if in the morning he could haul he would go on.

 

* * *

 


End file.
